Ninja Attack!. Hiroko Yoda

Ishikawa Goemon

       Tokugawa Ieyasu

      The Illustrated Ninja, Part III:

       Tools

       Transformations

       Hyakunin Gumi

       Kosaka Jinnai

       Miyamoto Mushashi

       Sanada Yukimura

       Yagyu Jubei

       Matsuo Basho

       Tokugawa Yoshimune

       Hasegawa Heizo

       Sawamura Jinzaburo Yasusuke

       Mamiya Rinzo

      The Illustrated Ninja, part IV

       Tricks & Techniques

       The Legend Begins

       Nippon Zaemon

       Jiraiya

       Sarutobi Sasuke / Kirigakure Saizo

      The Illustrated Ninja, part V

      The Ninja Home, Weapons, The Ninja Legacy

       Real Ninja, Reel Ninja

      The Illustrated Ninja, part VI

       Ninja Pop Influences

       References

      An Exceedingly Brief History of Japan

       Glossary

       Bibliography

       Acknowledgments

      This book is dedicated to those ninja so good at their jobs we’ll never even know their names.

       FOREWORD

      You know your ninja. You’ve seen every movie—from the 1967 James Bond film, You Only Live Twice (the first ninja screen appearance abroad) to Eighties classics like Enter the Ninja and the more recent Ninja Assassin. Your collection of ninja comic books is embarrassingly large, spanning the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Usagi Yojimbo,” Frank Miller’s 1980s ninja-inflected reboots of “Wolverine” and “Daredevil,” to every appearance of Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes in “G.I. Joe.” You’ve followed ninja through anime—”Ninja Scroll” to “Naruto.” And it goes without saying you’ve vanquished the video games: “Shinobi,” “Mortal Combat,” “Ninja Gaiden.” The list goes on. And on.

      You may notice, however, that your favorite characters do not appear within the pages of this book, or that their profiles do not match what you have read or seen onscreen. This is deliberate. Actual, historical ninja are fascinating enough subjects without needing to muddy the waters with fantasy. We gathered intelligence from a wide variety of academic and historical sources, mainly Japanese-language, in an attempt to piece together the most likely descriptions of people and events.

      Ninja Attack! contains more than a thousand years’ worth of true stories of Japan’s most famous masters of espionage. Their successes and failures. Their allies and rivals. Their dedication to their families, their masters, and their craft of unconventional warfare. A lot of their stories are wilder than the plot of any ninja action flick, but here’s the twist. None of it is fiction. It’s historical fact.

      That said, this book certainly doesn’t represent the alpha and omega of ninja exploits. For all the tales we’ve chronicled here, more than a few ninja have undoubtedly taken equally awesome feats to the grave. There’s actually an old ninja saying that goes, “if you’ve got a reputation, you’re still a chunin”—just a mid-level practitioner of the craft.

      “If one can know the truth about ninjutsu, it isn’t really ninjutsu.”

      The concept of ninjutsu, the term for the martial art of espionage, is maddeningly difficult to pin down. Perhaps none has expressed the quantum nature of it as well as Masaaki Hatsumi, the last living descendent of the Togakushi school, who explained, “If one can even know the truth about ninjutsu, it isn’t really ninjutsu.” This is one reason why we chose to focus on the stories of the ninja themselves, rather than their martial art. The other is that martial arts are only part of the story. The trappings so intimately associated with ninja both in Japan and abroad—the outfits, the death-defying leaps and jumps, the exotic weapons and accoutrements—are, in the end, secondary to the men and women behind the masks.

      Which brings us to another point. Those masks are largely a work of fiction, as are the infamous all-black outfits. As for the question of what ninja actually did wear, ask yourself this: what does the average spy wear? The answer, of course, is whatever it takes to blend in and get the job done, whether that means shorts and a T-shirt, military fatigues, or a suit and tie. The same was true of the ninja. Hiding in plain sight was their entire modus operandi. Most dressed like farmers, both because it worked well as camouflage in a nation of farmers, and because most of them really were farmers. A real ninja would laugh at the portrayal of an intruder tiptoeing across a rooftop wearing black pajamas in broad daylight.

      But if that’s the case, why is that particular image so enduring, both in Japan and abroad? It’s safe to say that the Japanese didn’t invent the concept of assassins or spies, yet the ninja have pretty much become the world’s poster children for espionage, mayhem, and generally sneaky behavior. One possible answer lies in Japan’s proven ability to create internationally compelling pop-cultural characters, from ferocious monsters like Godzilla all the way down to cute and cuddly kittens like Hello Kitty. The key points of what constitute a ninja in the public mind—the masks, the shuriken stars, the black outfits—have been honed into a visual shorthand that happens to appeal to people around the world. Ninja may have been some scary customers in real life, but they have been tamed and distilled down to an instantly recognizable essence over